I've been debating with myself for weeks, in fact, about whether or not to even write about this, because it really is that pointless. See, there's this local television station here in Chicago, channel 23, too low-rent to even be a WB or UPN affiliate, so does what you see at cable channels like TVLand - that is, they air a bunch of old crap from the '50s, '60s and '70s that cost next to nothing to syndicate, then pitch it in their advertising that they're somehow providing some kind of cultural service to you by keeping these shows in the public eye. (It's a brilliant scam, by the way, in my opinion. I've even thought of a literary variation, as a possible future plan for this arts center I'm trying to open - of down the line, reprinting various public-domain novels in nice new physical volumes, like Penguin Classics does it, and making regular money keeping a "long tail" supply of titles on hand for retail and internet sales, managed with the "print on demand" equipment the center would hopefully own by the time this decision was made.)

Anyway, so channel 23's afternoons this summer have been full of kinds of weird random cultural flotsam - The Partridge Family, then The Monkees, then The Facts of Life, then Who's The Boss? (Hey, I'm Tony Micelli!), then Family Ties. And then at 4:00 and 4:30, right before I switch over to Fox for The Simpsons, channel 23 has been showing two episodes in a row of The Brady Bunch, which I've been pathetically getting into this summer, since that tends to be right around the time I'm getting home from my errand-running for the day. Which, yes, I know, is the very definition of cliche, a Generation Xer talking about The Brady Bunch, but it's weird I think how viewing them this summer has been yet another new experience than the other times I've caught a bunch of episodes in my life.

This summer, in fact, is the first time I've caught The Brady Bunch regularly since I was maybe seventeen or eighteen, right at the end of high school and the beginning of college. Almost twenty years of life later, it's funny I think how much more obvious to me now what the original shtick of The Brady Bunch was supposed to be, when it first went on the air; how it was supposed to be this light, old-school Kennedy-era Don't Eat the Daisies type family comedy/drama, where the kids are hip but all wearing early-'60s mod clothes, and in "out of the mouths of babes" style they're always accidentally saying the thing necessary for the adults to understand the resolution to that week's crisis.

When I was in my late teens, I of course enjoyed The Brady Bunch mostly for its campy ironic value; specifically, for its now-famous decision to pretend that Vietnam and the countercultural revolution were not taking place in the world where the Brady family lived. And this of course is a legitimately campy and ironic element of the show, which should be acknowledged as the main weakness of pre-'70s television; what's funny to me, though, is how now with age I appreciate a lot more what the producers were trying to do in the first place, in a non-ironic way.

I mean, when you look at the first years of The Brady Bunch through the filter of its contemporary culture, it's actually kind of this sweet idea - of this refreshingly old-fashioned family, living their lives right when the first stirrings of the counterculture were making themselves known (mid-'60s, Lyndon Johnson years), but ignoring it all because it has nothing to do with raising six rambunctuous, preternaturally smart and hip kids, out on a quiet street in a nondescript California suburb. If the world had stayed the same it was in 1965, The Brady Bunch would've never become the accidental historically ironic cultural document it's become; it's only when the world became a much stranger and more intense place, in the late '60s and early '70s, and the actors playing the kids decided they wanted the Bradys to be a little more with-it, do we get the campy elements that the show is primarily known for now.

Ultimately, I guess, the final irony of The Brady Bunch is this - that the elements that generated so much ridicule when it was first on, are the same elements that make it a timeless show now, and able to be enjoyed non-ironically even close to forty years later. This is something I think a lot of us don't think about much - that for every Brady Bunch from the late '60s that is still in the cultural radar, there were 30 other shows on the air at the same time that have faded into virtual dust and obscurity now. (And this, by the way, touches on a bigger subject that I always find fascinating - how it can be that so much of even our recent cultural past is now virtually forgotten, even though we've been obsessively documenting and recording it all for over a century now. And this of course is a subject that can be branched out to all kinds of interesting specific topics - why newspaper editors are still necessary, even in the age of citizen journalism, why podcasts never really took off until Apple embraced them, why Google isn't nearly the Antichrist the French seem to think they are, why our society will always need people good at sorting and understanding information, no matter how sophisticated the process of storing, aggregating and retrieving the raw data becomes. But that's several other essays for another time - hmm, maybe later this week, in fact!)

Anyway, enough of that long digression... My point is that cultural documents have to embody this special combination of elements in order to become important to future generations - they have to be sincere reflections of the times in which they were created, yet also need to have a certain universal element to them, to bring the details of living in those times home to audiences in the future. As a 36-year-old, I of course only know of Laugh-In, for example, but I bet there were a dozen other wacky countercultural variety shows on the air back then as well, all of which have faded into obscurity now, because they weren't as funny or were just too "in the moment" (however you want to define that), etc. So that's I think probably the most ironic thing about The Brady Bunch - that they stand now for us Citizens of the Future as one of our more common shared images of the '60s and '70s, even though there are undoubtedly hundreds upon hundreds of other shows, movies and books that would do a better job instead. And it's because there's a timeless element there in The Brady Bunch that still makes me giggle and relate sometimes - and especially the "let's put on a project in the backyard" episodes, as I was reminded of this week (like the "Pilgrim movie" episode, or the "Snow White" one), because this was a staple of the '70s Pettus household as well, with home movies always being made and skit shows being performed for the other kids in the neighborhood.

And then, of course, there's the other irony of what I now know, which is how much gayer Robert Reed seems to get with each approved change in his character's look and clothes. (And have you ever noticed that the actors weren't allowed to change their looks slowly with each new year? There's, like, three official times the characters get to change haircuts over the course of the show, each time they filmed a new introduction.) Channel 23 is showing the episodes out of order this summer, in fact, which just makes this fact more obvious - how at 4:00 Mike Brady will have that "Brave New Future" Devo haircut and be dressed in some smart turtleneck outfit, then at 4:30 have this crazy-ass "Three's Company" perm and always dressed in some tight colorful Hawaiian shirt that's unbuttoned down to his navel. Swing it, Robert! I wonder what kind of gay lover Robert Reed made, anyway? And how weird would it be to secretly date this actor in the '70s known the world over for being the patriarch of a goofy family TV show famously known for not acknowledging the gay-rights movement? That'd make for a fascinating novella published by Soft Skull, wouldn't it? Yes, steal the idea if you want - I won't be getting around to writing it myself.

And finally, something I've been curious about for years now - can someone please tell me what the fuck is up with that scary-ass jingle Paramount used in the '70s, attached to the end of television shows they distributed, with all those minor keys and augmented 7th chords and shit? You know what I'm talking about, right? Why would this multinational corporate conglomerate think that an appropriate jingle for them would be something that sounded like it was lifted from a '50s horror movie? The '70s, man...I'll never fuckin' understand them.

Okay, time for another prediction, so mark the date; we'll revisit it again a year or two from now (or some reader will point it out then, anyway), to see whether or not it's come true:

I predict that the relationship most of the general public has with online multimedia content is going to profoundly change, within a year of Microsoft's Xbox 360 being released to the public. (For those who don't know, this is the newest version of Microsoft's video-gaming system, probably coming out this Christmas. It's also going to be the first mainstream consumer device to ship with Microsoft's Windows Media Center operating system, along with lots of and lots of different ports, which means this will be the first time for many people that they'll be able to hook together their television, computer, stereo and telephone into one fully integrated system.)

Like, I'm predicting a profound increase in adult website memberships in 2006, as more and more people start watching downloaded MPEGs on their TV screens and realize (depending on the site, of course) that it's close in quality to watching a physical video or DVD. I'm predicting that 2006 will see the first podcast to get the same kind of audience numbers as a traditional radio show, not only as the subscription/delivery process becomes more flawless for more people, but also as more people are able to directly listen to them on their home stereo, without having to transfer files whatsoever. And on and on like this, I think - original video programming on the web becoming more and more popular, this new experiment at the BBC really exploding next year (where the network is offering all of their shows for free download now, for something like a week after they originally aired), especially among Americans.

This far away from release, of course, only us techies really understand at this point just what's shipping with the Xbox 360 this Christmas. And a lot of techies, I think, are making a big mistake and not seeing just how profoundly this newest Xbox is going to change things - surely as profoundly as the iPod did when it first came out, and probably even faster as well. Techies are notorious at this, after all, because 1) they've had all this technology available to them for years now; and 2) they can never understand the big deal behind "ease of use." Most techies look at this upcoming Xbox and say, "Yeah, so what? You can just hook up a J-D183 converter card instead for your video, and a spliced S-227 cord for your stereo, and do a Linux custom install on all your devices and run it all through a patched GNU driver, and get the same damn thing for 75 bucks." They're discounting, as they often do, the fact that most of us don't have the education necessary to patch together such a system ourselves, much less the time and inclination to do such a MacGuyveresque thing.

The more I learn about this new Xbox, the more convinced I am that it's going to change things profoundly for a lot of Americans, when it comes to how Americans get their entertainment and culture delivered to their home, and how they interact with this culture and entertainment once there (and on the go as well, of course, which is one of the main selilng points of it all). And this is both bad and good news, as is all new innovations in the world of culture; it'll let the big overwhelming companies, the Time Warners and Viacoms and whatnot, become even bigger and more overwhelming, but it'll also bring individual underground artists closer to delivering the same exact quality of project to the general public as these big companies do.

I mean, just look at what's happened in the music world - now that online MP3 sales are the norm, with the quality of physical packaging making no difference whatsoever in what the customer purchases, the line between "self-producing musician" and "major-label musician" has flattened to nothing, with tracks now not only sounding the same in quality, but the customer not even being subtly swayed by how professional the actual CD or liner notes look. And for the first time in history, you now have garage bands that really can directly compete with major labels in terms of audience and direct sales.

I'm convinced the same thing is going to happen with other forms of media, after this new Xbox comes out. Like, imagine the great world it will be when underground filmmakers won't have to raise the money for DVD duplication anymore - when they can just put the movie online instead, let people download it for three bucks, and have it saved in DVD quality to that person's hard drive for viewing at their convenience. It's going to turn every filmmaker, every podcaster, every citizen journalist into their own Blockbuster, their own NPR, their own NBC. And if you think things on the web are moving fast now, just wait until more of these consumer goods are in place - when a critical mass of Americans finally have a broadband connection, a cross-connected media center, and a standard operating system that will let all their devices communicate with each other. So, I guess we'll revisit this a year from now, and see how correct my prediction has become by that point. Hmm!